As it were, my time in the gay hotel is coming to an end after seven months of intrigue and boundary-pushing, and I find myself moving into a new apartment with different conditions at the beginning of April. It got me thinking about the reality of a living situation versus our expectations of how it should or will go, since this will now be the fifth place in which I've lived in Lisbon, not including staying with friends when I didn't have a room of my own.
Often when we think about moving, changing our lives, or just going somewhere temporarily, we form a mental image of what it will be, should be, must be like in order to accept the unknown and dive into it. We base our expectations on an already-familiar reality that may not have much to do with the way things work elsewhere. The details of new places, different social environments, different expectations, and different lifestyles get lost in mental translation, so the image of the new becomes an idealized picture of what we'd like for the present surroundings. The new apartment will solve all of the problems that exist in the current one. The new city will be just the change of pace I need to get on the right track. The vacation will be the getaway that will finally clear my head of all the thoughts that run through it at a million miles per hour.
Reality, of course, happens differently.
Often when we think about moving, changing our lives, or just going somewhere temporarily, we form a mental image of what it will be, should be, must be like in order to accept the unknown and dive into it. We base our expectations on an already-familiar reality that may not have much to do with the way things work elsewhere. The details of new places, different social environments, different expectations, and different lifestyles get lost in mental translation, so the image of the new becomes an idealized picture of what we'd like for the present surroundings. The new apartment will solve all of the problems that exist in the current one. The new city will be just the change of pace I need to get on the right track. The vacation will be the getaway that will finally clear my head of all the thoughts that run through it at a million miles per hour.
Reality, of course, happens differently.